Penis beaker. Two words that should not go together. Yet this week, due to the joys of Mumsnet, the concept became a thing.

In case you haven't seen the story: a woman by the name of Sara Crewe used the website to ask if her husband’s post-coital cleanup habits – he keeps a beaker of water and box of tissues on his bedside table, apparently – were normal. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the site to inform her in no uncertain terms that they were not.

Clearly, this is gross. There is something very dissonant about the notion of dunking your member like a biscuit. More importantly, you would end up with a contaminated beaker of water next to your bed. Pretty inexcusable.

But then, Mumsnet attracts this sort of thing. A while back, one woman asked whether it was normal to bring a potty to a restaurant so that her toddler could do a “number two” under the table. She’d been kicked out for allowing her child to do so, you see, and felt it was unfair. My goodness, did the Mumsnet users stick it to her. By the time the fuss died down, she must have felt like the foulest person alive.

Which highlights the real dangers of combining the penis beaker, or potty-under-the-table, or whatever, with the internet. Put something out there (so to speak) and you just don’t know what will come back. One can only imagine how mortified poor old Sara Crewe is at this moment, not to mention her penis-dunking husband.

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The most vivid example of asking the internet personal examples can be found on the Latvian-based website ask.fm. The concept of the site is that they throw at you any question they like – ever played spin the bottle? Would you do a "number two" under a table? Do you dunk your penis in a beaker? – and the wolfish audience lines up to savage you.

Why do people do this to themselves? Are they driven by a genuine desire to know whether or not they are normal? Are they seeking attention? Or are they simply posting a question in an offhand way, never dreaming that it would garner such controversy?

Either way, there is a lesson in all of this. If you feel the need to verify your personal habits against the national average, for God’s sake don’t use the internet to do so. It is the most obvious rule of thumb in the world ever. But many people, it seems, still don’t get it.